I don't care much about food. I can't remember a single meal that has given me pleasure. But I do care about my brother. I was eating at home in Iowa with my husband, Fletcher, when the phone rang.

Look, I know it's annoying when the narrative gets interrupted like this, but there's a couple of things you should know. First up, Fletcher is a bit of a loser. I try not to patronise him but contempt drips through every sentence. He earns next to nothing from his bespoke furniture and spends his spare time – and boy, does he have a lot of it – eating vegan food and cycling. I, meanwhile, am earning a fortune from a business I despise, Baby Monotonous, that makes dolls that look and speak like real people. Which is more than I do. The most important thing you should be aware of, though, is that I can't bear the thought of any reader missing the point. So every observation comes heavily signposted. And then repeated.

So the phone rang, and it was this dude saying that my brother Edison, a jazz pianist, was down on his luck. My jaw dropped when I collected Edison at the airport. Literally. He was so fat that he literally caused a solar eclipse, and when he got into the car, his thighs were literally hanging out the window. And when we got home he literally buried his head in the fridge and emptied it.

"How long is the fat fuck staying for?" Fletcher asked.

"How dare you be so unreasonable?" I shrieked. "You don't realise what a difficult childhood we had with a father who was a soap star and a mother who may or may not have commited suicide. He is staying for two months and if you can't stand it, you can fuck off yourself."

For reasons that were never entirely clear, Fletcher never did fuck off, choosing instead to make the odd sarky remark as I tended to Edison's every need. Every morning I would buy $1,000 of groceries, and each day the fridge would be empty by mid-afternoon. "We're starving," the stepkids would say, enabling me to go on a several-page rant about the nature of food in modern society. and what a potent symbol of its excess it was. Curiously, the one thing I didn't do was tell Edison that if he wanted to eat himself to death, I wasn't going to be the one who paid for it.

"Why don't you play the piano any more?" I asked Edison.

"Because I've eaten it."

To tell the truth, I enjoyed shocking you with descriptions of how his legs would be at the bottom of the stairs while his lardy ass was still at the top and how he used to shit so much that faeces would spill out the bathroom window. The day before he was due to leave I realised what everyone else with half a brain had guessed 100 pages before: he had no place to go.

"I'm going to share a flat with Edison for a year," I said, as if this was the most normal thing in the world rather than an unlikely plot twist. "We can diet together."

"Do that and I will leave you," sobbed the useless Fletcher.

"You're a complete bastard and you understand nothing," I yelled.

How I enjoyed that year, apart from the bits I didn't; it gave me so much time to go into details about ketosis, calories and addiction. Food. Can't live with it, can't live without it, eh? As my prose became more heavy-handed, my brother became less so and he could eventually play fewer than three notes at a time. Things did get tricky with Fletcher, but everything ended up fine for all of us. Happy days.

Except you've probably picked up I'm an unreliable narrator and that none of this happened so you've wasted the last three hours. I never did move in with my brother. He went back to New York and ate so many Big Macs that his stomach burst, and gallons of blood and shit flowed down Broadway. Chew on that, motherfuckers.